Implementing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is a great way of streamlining and optimizing your IT environment by utilizing virtualized resources from the cloud to complement your existing on-site infrastructure. It enables a flexible combination of the traditional on-premises data center alongside the benefits of cloud-based subscription services. If you’re not making use of this model, there’s no better opportunity to learn what it can do for you than in the upcoming webinar from Altaro: How to Supercharge your Infrastructure with Azure IaaS.

The webinar will be presented by Thomas Maurer, who has recently been appointed Senior Cloud Advocate, on the Microsoft Azure Engineering Team alongside Altaro Technical Evangelist and Microsoft MVPAndy Syrewicze.

The webinar will be primarily focused on showing how Azure IaaS solves real use cases by going through the scenarios live on air. Three use cases have been outlined already, however, the webinar format encourages those attending to suggest their own use cases when signing up and the two most popular suggestions will be added to the list for Thomas and Andy to tackle. To submit your own use case request, simply fill out the suggestion box in the sign up form when you register!

Once again, this webinar is going to presented live twice on the day (Wednesday 13th February). So if you can’t make the earlier session (2pm CET / 8am EST / 5am PST), just sign up for the later one instead (7pm CET / 1pm EST / 10am PST) - or vice versa. Both sessions cover the same content but having two live sessions gives more people the opportunity to ask their questions live on air and get instant feedback from these Microsoft experts.

Acunetix has just released their annual Web Application Vulnerability report which aims to provide security professionals, web application developers, system administrators, web server administrators and other interested parties with an analysis of data on web application vulnerabilities detected the past year via scans run on the Acunetix Online platform.

The extensive report has been compiled from scans performed from more than 10,000 targets and reveals some very interesting results about today's security threats and the percentage of organizations that correctly deal with their vulnerable web applications and exploits. From SQL Injection vulnerabilities to Cross-Site-Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities, popular CMS platform vulnerabilities to remediation steps and more.

Here are some of the report's highlights that will surely interest every IT security professional and web application developer:

46% of websites scanned contained high severity vulnerabilities

87% of websites contained medium severity vulnerabilities

SQL Injection vulnerabilities have declined slightly

30% of websites contained Cross-Site-Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities

30% of websites had vulnerable JavaScript Libraries

30% of websites were WordPress sites with a number of vulnerabilities

The free to download report is a great opportunity for professionals to learn more about the latest and greatest vulnerabilities circling the web and proactively take measures to ensure their own websites and web applications are properly tested and patched against popular vulnerabilities and attacks.

The 2019 Web Application Vulnerability Report is offered completely free to download and is used by leading security professionals and web application developers to help understand how to protect network and applications for the latest security threats and web vulnerabilities.

Altaro, a global leader in virtual machine data protection and recovery, has introduced WAN-Optimized Replication in its latest version, v8, allowing businesses to be back up and running in minimal time should disaster strike. Replication permits a business to make an ongoing copy of its virtual machines (VMs) and to access that copy with immediacy should anything go wrong with the live VMs. This dramatically reduces the recovery time objective (RTO).

Optimized for WANs, Altaro's WAN-Optimized Replication enables system administrators to replicate ongoing changes to their virtual machines (VMs) to a remote site and to seamlessly continue working from the replicated VMs should something go wrong with the live VMs, such as damage due to severe weather conditions, flooding, ransomware, viruses, server crashes and so on.

Drastically Reducing RTO

"WAN-Optimized Replication allows businesses to continue accessing and working in the case of damage to their on-premise servers. If their office building is hit by a hurricane and experiences flooding, for instance, they can continue working from their VMs that have been replicated to an offsite location," explained David Vella, CEO and co-founder of Altaro Software.

"As these are continually updated with changes, businesses using Altaro VM Backup can continue working without a glitch, with minimal to no data loss, and with an excellent recovery time objective, or RTO."

Centralised, Multi-tenant View for MSPs

Managed Service Providers (MSPs) can now add replication services to their offering, with the ability to replicate customer data to the MSP's infrastructure. This way, if a customer site goes down, that customer can immediately access its VMs through the MSP's infrastructure and continue working.

With Altaro VM Backup for MSPs, MSPs can manage their customer accounts through a multi-tenant online console for greater ease, speed and efficiency, enabling them to provide their customers with a better, faster service.

How to Upgrade

WAN-Optimized Replication is currently available exclusively for customers who have the Unlimited Plus edition of Altaro VM Backup. It is automatically included in Altaro VM Backup for MSPs.

Upgrading to Altaro VM Backup v8 is free for Unlimited Plus customers who have a valid Software Maintenance Agreement (SMA). The latest build can be downloaded from this page. If customers are not under active SMA, they should contact their Altaro Partner for information about how to upgrade.

Acunetix is one of the first commercial, automated web vulnerability scanners to be released for Linux as well as Windows, offering customers the choice to scan for vulnerabilities using Acunetix on their preferred Operating System.

With its support of the Linux operating system, Acunetix has become one of the most popular web vulnerability scanners in the market offering an extensive list of vunerability detection capabilities that will satisfy the most demanding web application developers and network security professionals.

Benefits of Running Acunetix Web Vulnerability Scanner on Linux

Reliability and security: Linux is the operating system most often selected for servers that need close to 100% uptime. Using Linux increases the reliability needed for the thousands of operations required to scan a website.

Cost-effectiveness: Acunetix customers can run the scanner in their own private cloud on either Amazon AWS, Digital Ocean or Google Cloud, for example.

So you’ve heard all about Windows Server 2019 - now you can see it in action in a live demo webinar on November 8th! The last WS2019 webinar by Altaro was hugely popular with over 4,500 IT pros registering for the event. Feedback from gathered with that webinar and the most popular features will now be tested live by Microsoft MVP Andy Syrewicze. And you’re invited!

This deep-dive webinar will focus on:

Windows Admin Center

Containers on Windows Server

Storage Migration Service

Windows Subsystem for Linux

And more!

Demo webinars are a really great way to see a product in action before you decide to take the plunge yourself. It enables you to see the strengths and weaknesses first-hand and also ask questions that might relate specifically to your own environment. With the demand so high, the webinar is presented live twice on November 8th to help as many people benefit as possible.

The first session is at 2pm CET/8am EST/5am PST and the second is at 7pm CET/1pm EST/10am PST. With the record number of attendees for the last webinar, some people were unable to attend the sessions which were maxed out. It is advised you save your seat early for this webinar to keep informed and ensure you don’t miss the live event.